Lit Fires
by SarahFromHell
Summary: '...her blood drips down into the fire. This is not the price, she knows-only the conduit.' Companion piece to "How Many Years?" Multi-chapter, Zilpha's POV. Twice the incest!
1. Farewell Letter

Once, as children together, at their secret spot in the woods, James had told Zilpha a story.

The grove was green and still and peaceful. Afternoon sun filtered through the leaves above them and dappled gently over their bodies as they sat beside each other. The woods were nearly quiet, the only sounds to break the silence being the distant trill of a lone bird somewhere in the canopy, and James's low sonorous voice. The story was of a woman named Helga. And then Helga did this and then Helga did that… James's voice rose and fell in boyish excitement as he told it.

Zilpha rose up and took him by the throat and pushed him down to the forest floor. A cold rage flowed through her fingers as she tightened them around his neck. James's hands closed upon hers, digging into her skin with his nails in the desperate violence of his effort to tear them away from him. His legs kicked out under her, flailing, scrambling for purchase. Neither one spoke. Zilpha dug her fingers in deeper. The woods remained silent.

She felt the strength in his limbs begin to flag, saw his eyes flutter closed and his hands drop down to his sides, and pulled her hands away as if scalded. Then James opened his eyes again and looked into hers.

"You love me," James said, his voice full of wonder.

"No…"

"Yes, you love me, you do. I can see it." He took her hand in both of his, licked and sucked hungrily on her fingers. "You love me and you are mine for always." He pulled her close and rolled her body down to lay under him. Covered her face and neck with hot kisses. Slid his hand under her skirts and stroked her until she moaned and pressed herself up against him. Slipped a finger in and twisted it hard inside her, a foretaste of the true fury of his passion, until her head tilted back and her legs opened up for his touch and she let him do what he would with her.

It had been easy for her to forgive him, back then.

Now, fingers trembling with cold rage, Zilpha sits at her writing-table and pens a letter to her brother. A farewell letter, full of pretty words about love, pretty phrases about death and God and Heaven—

—lies upon lies upon lies.


	2. Her Eyes Are Open

She lies down in her room with the door bolted shut. It is acceptable and expected for a woman of her standing to be an invalid. At first she wore only her shift, then drew the curtains closed and stripped down to nothing at all. She is sick of her stays, the lacing and unlacing they require, the way they push her breasts out and lift them up in a display appetizing to most men. She stretches her arms and legs out as far as they will go and meets with nothing, no wall of flesh blocking her way, but she is less alone now than she ever was when she shared the bed with her husband. Sounds follow her always, human voices that crowd in on her when her thoughts are idle and recede when she tries to grasp them. The voices are African and they hate her.

The servants don't bother her. They sit in the kitchen and eat and gossip all day. Her late husband used to browbeat them for the smallest of things: a dropped plate, an "insolent tone", any show of concern for his wife. Their new mistress is kind in comparison, barely asks for anything in fact, and if she's short with them immediately remembers to blame it on her grief. For them the house is quiet now, even peaceful.

She frantically shuts her ears against the voices, but it is no use.

They are in her soul, which is also her brother's—he said it wasn't, not anymore—if it is not then why does she hear them. James believes her dead now, presumably. She distantly wonders if the news was enough to break his stone face.

Laudanum quiets the voices a little bit. More, it quiets her. Without it she might pace the room and cry out. Without it she feels fragile, as if a casual touch might shatter her, yet at the same time as if she might run out this house and try to break the next man she sees (remembering again the feel of that night, the terrible joy in her hands), and what good would that do her? She never went to military seminary. Never went anywhere really, almost ten years sitting in this house, praying and embroidering that's what she did. No use to think about it now, no use to think. Better the laudanum. She's careful with the dosage though, never taking too much. There are two diamonds locked in a drawer in the sitting-room, reminding her to never take too much.

She takes just enough to silence her own screams, to bury them in a deeper grave, until no one at all can hear them, not even her. Until she is free to let the African words wash over her as meaningless as dreams or the slap of waves on a ship, and just lie there, waiting as she has done for ten years—waiting for her brother to come home.

…

And then, at last, she hears it again: not a ghost-voice but a witch-voice, a penetrating voice that cuts through her sleep. She recognizes it at once as James, not by the tone but by the language. "_That awful bird-cackling,"_ Mother had called it, when they were children.

_"__No, Mummy, Mummy, look!"_ Zilpha had said. It was not long after Mother had stopped letting her wear her hair in plaits. "_Eepinis!" _she'd said, grabbing an apple from the sideboard and holding it up proudly.

_"__Put that down Zilpha, you know it's not dinnertime yet."_ James, being older, had been whipped for not speaking proper English. She'd ran her fingers along the scars.

By the last days of her marriage she'd forgotten most of it, but remembered just enough to understand what needed to be done.

_Kill him now and be free,_ the voice had told her, and she had obeyed.

_If Horace had died while I was still alive, _the voice says now, _I would not be spending my days in bed. I would take his coin and go to war against them, as your brother has done._

Another veil in her mind is torn open, and she remembers: a woman's dark eyes somewhere above her, a face so much like hers as to make her heart break. Crying and hitting her brother with childish fists because he wouldn't take her upstairs anymore. Mother telling Father in an angry whisper, _"At least one of your children should be brought up decently." _This has been her life, her entire childhood: lies upon lies.

"Um-iiqsu!" she cries out, her face wet from crying, then claps her hand over her mouth—the servants will hear. She will have to think of something to tell them, to justify herself, or they will spread rumors all over London of her madness. And she already knows what is done to women who are mad. The voices are receding now. Her mother is dead. Only one phrase remains like an emissary across vast oceans, dazzling and radiant in three languages, words to be remembered and loved. _It is not wrong to go back for that which has been forgotten. _Would James really consign her to that life again? To be a proper English widow and pray on her knees each Sunday? She needs to see him again, to ask him. And she will, she realizes. She will.

It was his desire, fierce and unrelenting, that brought her to this place. His desire, slipping through the cracks in her dreams, pulling her up out of her sleep with ruthless and indomitable will. His desire that opened her eyes...

And now her eyes are open. What is done cannot be undone.


	3. First Attempt

The sky above the Thames is grey and cold but refuses to give up its rain. Grey and dried up like her, Zilpha thinks, although by now the laudanum has worn off and she has a solid meal in her, so her step, though aimless, is strong and sure. She walks along the bank wearing a plain dress dyed in mourning black, so modest as to be nearly shapeless, clothing to be left alone in. It works: the men of London pay her no mind. She is not the first woman to walk the water's edge alone and contemplate the veil between life and death.

She turns southwest towards the waning sun. Thinking of Africa, what must have been done to him over there.

_Those ten years I lived a sheltered life. Whatever little indignities I went through, they cannot compare to what he has suffered..._

She doesn't believe it.

She needs James here: to speak to her, to explain her to herself. She loves him now more than she ever did. It is not enough.

The dead want her. They are down in the water, waiting. They terrify her less than the wants within her own soul. She does not hear the cries of her son among them...in her mind he is still a crying infant, always. Her dear baby boy. Once in her anguish she had prayed God never to have a girl.

The skies have gone dark now. But she does not need light to see, she never did.

No more than she ever needed new china or a husband. Tomorrow morning is Sunday, she'll miss church too.

He had told her to thank her God. But what is God? Another man. The foul stinking breath of a fat priest. Yet the other way lies Deviltry and madness. A gift, James said. The voices of the dead…their power.

Their father, in his madness, used to light fires.

She takes a flint and a sack of kindling from the hearth and walks along the foreshore until she finds a suitably secluded spot.

_James…the waters still connect us…_

…

Openness. Spaciousness. The soft rustle of waves, the gentle creaking sound of wood on rope. A darkness she fumbles through, hesitant and half-blind. The delicious coolness of sea air in her nostrils, that smell which she has always equated with freedom. At the bow of the ship, his form, standing tall and watchful. Magnificent. Godlike. She might push him into the water, if she had flesh.

And then she pulls back and sees the wooden boards of the ship's side, a name—_The Good Hope_—and a date painted on them, bobbing in and out of the black depths. And she knows that she has broken in.

She returns to her brother, still standing at the bow ramrod-straight, but his head tilted ever so slightly, his eyes alert in a different way, he sees her.

"You are dead," he whispers softly, barely more than a breath.

"Do you want me to be?" she whispers back into his ear. She licks the side of his neck, tastes the sting of salt there, feels his head begin to turn…

And then she is sitting by a fire on aching haunches, breathing in smoke, shivering madly despite the heat—because of the heat.

The next morning she makes some inquiries at the docks. The men tell her nothing, the boys copy the men and tell her nothing, but the whores prove more willing. Especially after she slips them a few coins. Yes, _The Good Hope_ is a ship. Yes milady, it left from this harbor. When? Oh, a couple days ago, I'd say. Bound for where? Now how would a girl like me know that? Bursts of laughter. Another whore, young and cheerfully pretty despite a missing front tooth, chimes in: wasn't that the day we had that great commotion with the redcoats? The king's men said they were looking for some traitor… Zilpha turns away quickly, her heart pounding. She walks back home and tears through her late husband's files, the records of the ships his company insured. _The Good Hope_ is not among them.

The singing in her blood will not stop. She forces herself to swallow down some toast and tea, then falls into an exhausted stupor for perhaps an hour. Wakes up to the sound of screaming, a ring of coal-dark faces. _Murderer_, they tell her. Still exhausted, she closes her eyes again. The faces remain. Moonlight and torchlight glint off their accusing eyes as she looks at them, dumbly. She has no words for them.

When she opens her eyes her dead husband's face is there. He says the same thing.

"You tried to murder me first," she tells him calmly, and gets up to make herself a proper supper.


	4. Devil's Bargain

"Little ZIlpha. I dinna expect to see you here again," Brace says as he opens the door for her.

_I have lines on my face and cuts that may yet scar, I have married and borne and lost a child, and still he calls me "little Zilpha."_

The old man looks shrunken. Or is it just that she remembered him as larger? Eternal Brace, dour and scolding in all her memories, yet here somehow comforting, reassuring, a part of her childhood.

"Always glad for your company. But, ah, your brother's not here."

"I know." She starts inspecting the place, and sees what she did not notice the night she came to her brother blooded and exultant: the house is falling apart. "Did he tell you where he is bound?"

"Why, for America. Dinna you read the letter he sent ye?"

"Apparently you did."

_Impudent old man,_ she thinks, _doesn't even have the decency to act sorry for it._

"But did he tell you what city?" she says. "What port?"

"No, nothing. Just 'America,' he said." She pauses in her survey of the room to glance at the old servant, and notices how broken down he looks. _This one, too, James has kept in the dark._

Before she knows it they are embracing. His body is bonier than she remembered. She smells the alcohol on his breath, fights back a tear…

She sees the four men burst into her little attic room, telling her _come along now or we'll have to use force,_ calling her by her foreign English name. She feels their grip on her arms as she spits at them and curses them in the true tongue. Feels them grab hold of her legs and carry her bodily to the waiting stretcher, hold her down and strap her legs and handcuff her to it. Sees the door of the closed carriage shut down on her screams, on the last she will see of the outside world.

_Horace's man,_ the voice in her head says. _He watched._

She wonders yet again if he watched during the other taking. That fateful night she slept in bed unknowing, just a few days into her lying-in. The night her baby boy was spirited away, for her own good Father said, to preserve her from ruin, and no one would tell her where her baby boy went or even if he was alive. It took her years to stop asking.

She is aware, with her new eyes, of the place on the old man's body where the energy gathers: the soft spots at the sides where the kidneys are, the artery on his neck.

_I know, my beautiful daughter. But not yet. We have a use for him here in London._

She pushes him away harshly, her breasts still aching. "James wants you alive, so you're alive," she mutters. And could the same thing be said about her. A quiet resigned prayerful widow's life in London, remarriage, death—it is the same. But she has the means to do otherwise now, to travel, say, as many rich widows do, joining some pleasure-cruise up and down the Italian coast chatting and sketching the ruins, it is not wrong it is not wrong _what on earth did you _think _I'd do with a diamond?_

She roams through every room in the house, waving the old man away when he tries half-heartedly to follow. She can smell it here James's presence.

"Just what the hell ye be looking for in this dump?" Brace calls after her peevishly.

"Some things of my brother's. Papers and such. What James forgot to take with him when he left London."

All around her there lies the remainder, the detritus of James.

But this house is one he has abandoned.

She walks over to the fireplace, notes the ash beside it, the traces of different colored powders, the marks etched there in a language which is neither English nor Latin. The things of the spirit, which she knows not of. The ways of the spirit, which she was not taught.

She crouches by the fire and lights it, watches the flames grow.

"I ask of you again…Mother…"

She listens to the flames and nods.

"Yes, I will pay any price."

She smears her hands in the ash and the colored powder. Covers her face and neck in white, draws the red line under her eye. Unbuttons her sleeve, brings out her little pen-knife and slashes at her arm until the blood drips down into the fire. This is not the price, she knows—only the conduit.


	5. Breaking In

He is at the prow again, his bearing as erect as ever, his eyes still looking out. She has varied the time of night, but there he still stands. Does her brother never sleep? She places her body between his and the sea. This time, when she reaches out to draw his face to hers, her grasp on him is no longer tenuous. This time, she has entered his mind as easily as a sigh.

It had always been like this: she'd corner him alone somewhere, anywhere dark, and pull his face down to hers for a kiss, exulting in the taste of his full lips, the salty rough stubble under them, the danger. The danger was very real: he'd follow after her always, demanding more kisses, a feel of her naked thigh, a declaration. His easy social dominance at boarding school had spoiled him, he did not know how to be discreet. He'd speak to her of the adventures they'd go on together, of taking her away. India, Africa, America, the places they'd conquer together—so he said. She could never quite make up her mind as to whether he was serious. Most times she would turn away after no more than a peck, for she did not really believe him, and she was afraid. This time—he has not taken her away, but she is here now. Here under her own power. And so she drinks him in long and deep—no one will stop her—and slips her hand in under the fabric of his shirt, to better feel the heat of him, until he breaks his mouth away from hers, just long enough to say:

"What do you want of me?"

She smiles. "I remember once you came to me in the night, and I asked you the same question. You said that you intended to take my body, my mind and my soul..."

"'Nothing I have not had.' I remember." He grunts. The air is thick between them, suffused with the scent of spilled blood. "I will return to you, Zilpha. I would have returned to you in London had you waited. But you will not take me down into your waters just yet. I have business here to attend to."

"Business where?"

"Here in the land of the living. Where you cannot reach." So mournfully he says this. As if her death was the only thing that could ever keep him apart from her. Oh there are tears in his eyes now? Let him mourn. She has no more sympathy.

"I have reached you here," she speaks softly into his lips. "Haven't I."

He fists a hand into her unbound hair, pulls her head back roughly and cruelly.

"Have you?" he says. She feels his carrion breath against her exposed neck. He hears her heartbeat quicken. He pauses, as if in thought, then pushes her away. "Run along now sister. Go back to your _God_."

She senses her strength faltering, the feeling leaving her...

No.

Far away, by the fire, her nearly lifeless body begins to stir. The song of her chanting grows from a murmur to nearly a shout. In one short, sharp breath she blows the ash from her palms into the fire, that ash which she knows is both her brother's pigments and the burnt remains of her letters to him—their mingled bodies.

She sees the shock go through him, sees his body tremble. She presses her naked body up against him and moves to whisper in his ear:

"I killed him," she says. "So we are the same now."

She feels his cock stir suddenly and press hard into the flesh of her inner thigh, needing more of her, heedlessly demanding entrance. It was always their sameness that most excited him. That obscene knowledge he used to taunt her with, that they were the same in blood and spirit, and he'd prove it to her, if she dared follow him into the woods. She has followed him into much darker places since. And so she lets her hands roam freely over his flesh that she owns, letting him know that she intends to take him now, body, mind and soul—as before.

"Take all that off," she tells him, her voice hoarse with lust, and he obeys.

She has him up against the railing. She arranges her legs on each side of his hips, and lowers down onto him. The last time she did this they were both clothed, and both afraid. He'd barely moved a muscle, afraid of her fear, afraid the least movement of his would cause her to remember she was a Christian, and leave. No more. She is no longer a Christian, and she knows now that she will never leave him again. She does not know what will become of their love. She may end up taking a knife to him. But she will never leave him.

He cups her face in his hands, moves them slowly and firmly down to her neck, her shoulders, her hips, her thighs. He moves his hands over her body as if trying to memorize her shape. His tenderness, which the rumour-mongers who've declared him a violent savage would never dream him capable of. But it is a tenderness born from savagery, for who else but her has embraced it, taken it in, inhabited his savagery so fully? She curls her fingers greedily along the black edges of his tattoos. They are beautiful. She hates them. She wishes she had been there when each one of them was made; she wishes she'd been the one to cut them into his skin herself.

She has not let him inside her yet. He is close, very close to pulling her down onto his full length; she can tell by the gasps he lets out every time she rocks herself against him, faster and faster now, by the way his hands roughly pinch and grab at her breasts, no longer meditative but urgent. Then suddenly he is in her. She feels the shock of it go through her as he starts to move inside her: his possession of her. Her possession of him. The blood-bond between them sealed again.

He shifts beneath her and turns them around so he is facing the railing and the sea. Tries to position her there, as if she could lean against the railing. He has forgotten, in his passion for her, that she is no longer made of tangible flesh.

For a moment she can picture what it must look like from the outside, should anyone chance upon this nocturnal tryst: James standing at the bow completely naked, muttering to himself, his arms out passionately encircling nothing and his cock thrusting into empty air. She giggles against his shoulder, then stiffens. If some crewmembers come upon him like this, they will most likely walk away shrugging their shoulders: "That mad Delaney." He will not be ruined by this, he will not be put in mortal danger.

She takes his arse in a vicious grip and bites into his neck as hard as she can. It won't leave a mark but that doesn't matter. He gasps in surprise and pain, then exhales in recognition, in a new and fiercer pleasure. Does he understand yet that his Zilpha, his _real_ Zilpha, has returned to him?

He thrusts harder, grabs her hips and violently pulls her into him, seeking his release in her. But she is no longer seeking hers—there is something else he has that she wants more.

"Where are you bound?"

He is moaning, groaning, muttering: my love, my love, my love...

"Where are you bound?"

She takes him by the hair and forces him to look into her eyes.

"Where are you bound?"

The fire blazes upward. He fucks her with merciless speed and intensity, and she is losing the ability to form coherent words or rational thoughts. But her will, her will remains the same.

"I'll know... I'll know..." She screams out the words as she shudders around him.

He growls and tightens his grip on her flesh, hard enough to hurt, buries his face in her neck and breathes her in, plunges face first into his dark ecstasy.

He is losing himself in her.

He is lost.

She runs her fingers through his hair, almost but not quite tenderly. With the other hand she reaches down and takes out his spent cock. He is soft right now and, she knows, deeply sensitive. She twists her fingers around him. Her voice is like her fingers: slow, measured, inexorable.

"Where are you bound?"

In a soft monotone, as if in trance:

"Porto Delgado, in the Azores."


	6. The Price

He reaches out, as if to caress her. But she does not feel it—she is already gone. By the hearth, her body bestirs itself again. She puts out the fire and washes her hands and face, working quickly, with neat efficient movements. Decides to not bother with calling a cab, merely curling up to sleep on the rotting chaise-lounge.

She awakens to Brace's hesitant knock on the door.

"Did ye find what ye were searchin' after?"

"Yes."

Later in the morning she thinks better of it, and returns with a number of empty perfume-bottles which she fills with powder and ash. She lets Brace watch her do it, silently daring him to act. He wrings his hands but says nothing. By this time she has already been to five different jewelers, seeking out the highest price for her wares. She sells off the first diamond and most of her jewelry, keeping only a small modest cross necklace: a poor cover in truth for her sin, but men see what they want to see.

_Do you know what you ask for?_ Mother had said from the flames. _The English hate this knowledge and all who hold it, so much that they would rather think me a mother who tries to kill her own child. It would have been better for James if I had never opened his eyes. But I did not do it for him, I did it because our people need his strength as a warrior. Are you prepared for them to need yours?_

Besides coin, she is not taking much: just those few small bottles, her writing-set, her pen-knife, a good supply of pins for her hair, some rat-poison and insect-powder, and tincture of laudanum to soothe the nerves and hurry sleep. For clothing she takes just a few scraps of widow's weeds. She has decided that she will stay in mourning for awhile: she has no wish to remarry, and black shows stains less than any other colour.

All morning, the pictures have flooded her mind. She pays the captain his bribe and steps up to the ship's deck, visions blooming behind her eyes.

She wishes to think only of James. Of their love, of the happiness that awaits them. He is at sail, and she is alive and free. They can depart now together as he promised, for America, its sea and mountains, that untamed wilderness where they can at last be safe…

She wishes to think only of love. But instead her mind keeps returning, over and over again, to the price. She sees them as if in a line before her, the pale self-satisfied faces of these men, these merchants and ship-captains. She sees their guns, their ships, their chains, their stone walls, their religious virtue, their scientific theories, and the fundamental weakness behind all of it. Oh and she knows that she will be charming with them, that she will gaze adoringly up at them with a modest shy smile, that her steps will be light and silent, and that her strength, paltry as it is, will not fail her. She sees them as they are—

—pale bodies gutted like fish. Any man can be killed in his sleep.


End file.
